Three key roles in a business

Owner, Director and CFO are three very important roles in a business. We'll talk about them today in a new blog post from LLC «ElectraQuix». Often the owner fulfils all three roles themselves, especially in small and micro businesses. However, this does not benefit the company.

Owner

What functions are characteristic of a business owner? First of all, it is the strategy of the company, assessing its future and setting strategic goals.

The main functions of the owner are:

Strategic planning: developing a plan, communicating it to the team and controlling the implementation of this strategy.
Strategic marketing: analysing the market, competitors, products, promotion technologies, etc.
Formation of key rules of the company's work: what clients it works with, what clients it does not work with, what principles apply within the company.
Financial management: even if the company has a CFO, the owner still needs to understand the budget, know the basic financial principles, etc.
Developing new products and new technologies, launching start-ups.

Director

A director (or executive director), as opposed to an owner, is in charge of ‘operations’, i.e. dealing with day-to-day issues and dealing with unforeseen situations. He must be present in the company most of the time in order to understand what is going on there, his task is to achieve growth in current performance. All this happens within the framework of rules and strategy that the owner of the company has defined.

The main tasks of a director are:

To deal with operational issues.
To deal with the coordination of the heads of departments.
Work on the implementation of the budget.
Achieve the growth of the company's indicators.
Conduct inspections in the company.
Implement strategic programmes.
Perform representative functions.
Build a team.

The functions of an owner and the functions of a director are significantly different. If one person holds both the position of owner and director, then, of course, the role of executive director will squeeze out the role of owner, because there will simply not be enough time to work on strategic tasks. Therefore, it is important to separate the functions of owner and director.

Chief Financial Officer

The CFO is the counterbalance to the executive director. The executive director is all the time interested in keeping the production lines busy, the staff busy, the company fulfilling its revenue plan, etc. Therefore, he is willing to throw all resources at operational tasks. The CFO must be able to say ‘no’ so that the company does not waste its funds. He works to solve the question: how to utilise the money so that the company grows and expands. The CFO sets the rules of financial management and monitors compliance.

The main functions of a CFO are:

Creates a financial model and rules for money management.
Implements and monitors the accounting system.
Plans and implements the investment policy of the company.
Analyses the company's cost system and calculates the break-even point.
Plans and secures financing for the company's current operations and development.
Identifies, measures, evaluates and minimises financial threats.
Checks how department managers conduct financial planning.